Friday Aug 02, 2013

JavaOne Shanghai was held last week in Shanghai. It was a joint event with Oracle Open World and OPN Exchange with a combined registeration of 19,000 people. I don't know the exact split of JavaOne attendees, but I'd guess around 1000 developers.

Peter Utzschneider, Vice President, Java Product Management, kicked off the JavaOne keynotes by explaining how Oracle, with the Java Community, will "Make the Future Java." He said Oracle is now, and will continue to: drive innovation and make the Java platform complete, provide tools to make it easy to develop and use Java, foster dialog with the community, and communicate clearly and continuously. As if to drive home the last point, Java Technology Ambassador and JavaOne Content Chair Stephen Chin introduced the rest of the keynote speakers in Mandarin (the audience was polite).

Throughout the conference, there was lots of interest in Java Embedded. In her keynote, Nandini Ramani, Vice President of Engineering, Java Client and Embedded Platforms, explained that the embedded space is very exciting. She said "We are surrounded by devices that are talking to each other," and "Java is the right solution for this space." Chris Baker, Senior Vice President, ISV, OEM and Java Sales, drove home the point that for IoT(the Internet of Things) to be successful, it will take an active ecosystem of Java developers to drive the innovation needed. To demonstrate this, Chris invited Axel Hansmann, Vice President, Strategy & Marketing Communications of Gelmalto, to the stage. He explained that Gelmalto devices are everywhere, including thousands of Bank of China bank cards. Hansmann announced the Gelmato Bubble Board, which he called "the perfect way to get started with Java and M2M." Available in the Fall, developers can reserve a Bubble Board now.

Cameron Purdy, Vice President, Cloud Application Foundation, came to the stage and discussed the recent release of Java EE 7. He explained the themes of the release are developer productivity, support of HTML 5 and meeting enterprise demands. He mentioned the the important of Websockets and how they allow bidirectional communication. Purdy called JSON "the linga franca of the web," and explained that popular websites offer JSON as the data exchange format with their RESTful web services. [Ed Note: For an introduction to JSON, check out OTN's new tech article "Java API for JSON Processing."]

After these overviews, the Java Evangelists came to the stage drilled down on new Java features. It was clear that Oracle continues to innovate, communicate, and Make the Future Java.